Success - RHS Campaign for School Gardening

g

Congratulations to everyone who helped to make the garden the success it has been thus far.  We have just learnt from the RHS Campaign for School Gardening that we have successfully passed both our Benchmark 1 'Planning your Garden'  and Benchmark 2  'Getting Started' targets.  This is fantastic news as we are now well on our way to achieving our target of all five benchmarks by the end of term.

Amazing temperatures over the weekend produced extra excitement on Monday morning when everyone discovered that the broad beans had emerged.  All the vegetable beds have grown so much this week and the Lillian lettuces are almost climbing out of the salad bed.  Hopefully we will be able to pick a variety of salad leaves next week to serve in the Dining Hall as an accompaniment to the childrens' lunchtime main meal.  It will be really interesting for them to sample the different flavours and discover what they all taste like.  Many of the vegetables are a 'cut-and-come-again' crop which hopefully means there will be a steady supply of baby leaves throughout the term.

In the classroom Form 1 and Form 2 have been busy catching up on their garden journals. They are also making some really professional bookmarks for their journals - gathering leaves and adding materials to create an Art collage on one side of the bookmark, and using 'Wordle' in ICT to create word clouds of the words that spring to mind when they visit and work in their vegetable garden.   Form 1 have also been making some traditional wooden labels for their vegetable beds which will give extra information about all their plants.  Many other Art classes have been enjoying the last of the warm weather to create drawings and watercolour paintings in the garden.

In ICT pupils have looked more closely at the soilscape  of Surrey.  Using interactive tools available through both the the government Defra MAGIC programme and Cranfield University's LandIs Soilscape maps they have identified the soil type specific to our area of Claygate.  





Next week we hope that some pupils and parents will volunteer to help  to keep an eye on the vegetable patch over half-term.  (Please contact Mrs Bawden if you feel you might be able to spare a few minutes one morning or evening over the holiday period).